SD: CH175 - A SERPENT'S PILGRIMAGE

It began with sensation.

No sights. No sounds. Just pressure. Like she had been sucked through a reed and splintered into threads. Each one twitching independently in the dark, shivering with fragmented memory and instinct.

Memories of something long, sinuous, heavy with hunger and venom.

Nagini screamed.

Or tried to.

There was no throat. No tongue to shape the noise. No lungs to push air. Only a disembodied shriek that echoed across the threshold of magic, felt but never heard. She didn’t remember the moment of her death — only the pain. A thunderclap of agony. The feeling of splitting open — of her very self unraveling into necrotic flame.

She had exploded. Died, but not ended. And that was the problem.

Some part of her — soul, shadow, echo — had slithered beyond death. Caught between what was and what should have been. She was no ghost. No shade bound by regrets or unfinished business. No, she was something far worse.

A residue.

A curse that refused to disperse.

At first, there was nothing. No form, no shape. Just the memory of burning — the ache of being torn inside out, the mindless scream of every cell unraveling, necromantic fire blistering her very essence.

Then… cold.

Nothing like its mortal counterpart. This was worse — this was… emptiness. A void that clawed at her senses, that eroded what was left of identity. Time had no teeth here. Space did not exist. It was like being trapped inside a memory of nothing.

She drifted. No body. No direction. Only gravityless weight, bound to nothing. Her senses had no anchor. Touch was only a ripple in void. Sight was remembered light. Taste was ash from a long-decayed memory.

She felt herself — no more a thing. She was now… a tension. A coil made of longing and venom and ritual.

She remembered.

Flesh. Scales. Hunger. Voice.

Master.

That word lit the void around her like a spark. It wasn’t heard — it was felt. Like heat against phantom skin. Like the twitch of a tongue that no longer existed.

She tried to reach for it — for the presence that had defined her existence — but the space was empty. No tether. No command. No cold, distant will to wrap around. Only the ache of absence.

Where are you?

The question was a scream of mind, projected into nothing.

But nothing answered.

....

....

She drifted in magical detritus. Grave-murk and soul-ash. She passed through ley fractures and faded wargrounds. She found shadows of memories — both her own and not her own — embedded in the aether like brittle leaves. Tattered remnants of rituals, binding threads, old enchantments — She could feel the magical aftermath of her destruction — a crater of absence, where magic should have been. That wound still pulsed, leaking echoes.

But not him.

Where was the thread? The connection? The psychic tether that had always been there — cold and cruel and absolute?

Gone.

It was like trying to find warmth in a dead hearth.

Nagini howled, a psychic screech that would have shattered glass if she'd had a voice. Instead, it rebounded across reality like a fractured ripple, unseen and unfelt — except to those who truly listened.

No answer came.

The world did not shift.

Instead, memories came.

An old man falling. A snake devouring. A hand outstretched. A girl screaming.

The images were momentary. Wisps. She tried to hold them — to nest in them — but they dissolved with her touch. They weren’t real. They weren’t him.

But at least, she had a name to remember.

Voldemort.

That was the word. That was the anchor. Nagini’s consciousness — fractured though it was — began to reassemble. The Horcrux tether was gone, burned out, but the essence remained. She was no longer bound.

She was becoming.

....

....

The first form she found was a toad.

It was feeble. A magical creature tainted by dark runoff in the Black Lake. She slipped into it — or tried. Her spirit was too heavy. It bulged and convulsed, and the toad split open. Too weak. 

Really, what was she thinking? A snake settling as a toad? 

The second was a hag. A crone wandering too close to a cursed grove. Nagini slid in while she slept.

For three hours, she had flesh again. She tasted salt. Moved fingers. Opened her eyes and whispered, “S-seek...”

Then the crone’s soul pushed back — her will stubborn, unyielding — and Nagini was vomited out with a psychic scream.

She raged in silence. Screeched across the ether.

Why couldn’t they hold her?

....

....

It started with a scream.

The hiker had wandered too far into the forest — tired, hungry, lost — and by the time the possession took root, it was already too late. Nagini pressed into her like a splinter under skin. The girl jolted awake, eyes wide with terror as something inside her coiled tight.

She screamed. A raw, panicked shriek that sliced through the quiet glade. Birds scattered. A distant owl took flight.

Nagini panicked.

It was instinct — but instincts honed through violence. She made the girl stumble forward, arms flailing, searching for something — anything. Then she found it: a thorny bush, thick with brambles. She grabbed it, yanked a branch, and shoved it into the girl’s mouth.

The screaming continued.

Blood gurgled, trailing down her throat, but the sound did not stop. It had shifted registers, no longer a human cry, but something deeper. Twinned. As if another voice now screamed with it.

Nagini's own.

Desperately, she hurled the girl to the ground and began to bash her face into the soil. Again. And again. Mud, blood, and hair mixed with leaves. Bones crunched. A tooth snapped loose. The girl screamed still.

And with it, Nagini.

When she awoke, it was quiet.

But she could smell herself.

Rot. Fetid skin. Old blood. Worms. Something wet squelched as she sat up.

She was cold. Not the numbness of spirit-death. Not the drifting echo of soul-ash. No, this was real. Bodily. Mortal. But barely.

She looked down.

The body wasn’t entirely hers.

It had her shape — long limbs, narrow waist, familiar hands. But everything was off.

The left side of her body was nearly skeletal — parchment-like skin clinging to bone, riddled with dry lesions and brittle black veins. Her right foot was swollen and grey, bloated like something drowned. A shard of bone jutted from her thigh. Her chest rose and fell, but too slowly, too shallow.

Her face — she touched it. Her fingers sank into soft, rotted flesh. One cheek was entirely gone. Maggots squirmed in the cavity. Her right eye was missing. Her left glowed faintly gold.

Still, she moved.

She was… alive.

No. Not alive. Not fully.

Something between.

She gagged. Something slid up her throat — rough, fibrous. A coil of bramble, black with rot, spilled from her lips. She retched until her ribs cracked.

She tried to stand, but her knee bent the wrong way. She fell to all fours, panting.

Then it happened.

A shimmer. A twitch in her spine. A reversion.

The body convulsed, cracked, shrank.

She slithered.

She was a snake again — but even this form was wrong.

Scales peeled away in strips. Patches of her body were translucent, others grotesquely bloated. One fang dangled loose in her mouth. The end of her tail dragged like wet rope.

And still, she moved.

Then—a heartbeat.

A jogger. Muggle. She lunged.

The body spasmed. She devoured him whole.

When she emerged, she was on two feet again.

A mirror of her past self — and yet a mockery.

Her skin was smoother, but the rot remained beneath. Her eye returned, yet it twitched unnaturally. Her smile was too wide, her spine too straight. Joints popped like old doors. Her nails were sharp without being filed. Her breath misted even in warm air.

But it was better.

And the hunger remained.

"Ah," she whispered. Her voice raspy, but hers. Fully hers.

She understood now.

Consumption. Life. Blood.

She needed it.

....

....

The next days passed in blood, and the disappearances began to make the local news.

A couple went missing from their camper van. Two teenagers vanished from a hiking trail. A ranger found a single boot in a creek bed, still laced, no foot inside.

Each time, she consumed. Each time, the body rebuilt. Each kill strengthened her. Her body rejuvenated. Skin grew whole. Muscles filled out. Hair darkened to sleek black. By the tenth victim, her limbs matched. By the fifteenth, her skin no longer peeled. By the twentieth, she was whole — externally.

But not quite Nagini.

She was the woman from before. From her earliest memories. A maledictus from Grindelwald’s time. The last member of a cursed bloodline whose affliction had been fate.

She wore her human form again, yet not all was human.

She walked barefoot, and the earth recoiled. Leaves curled beneath her. Magic pulsed around her like a cloak. People looked at her and forgot her moments later. Children wept when she passed.

And then came the memories.

Not hers.

His.

She dreamed of orphanages. Of cave rituals. Of speaking to serpents before she ever knew how.

She remembered being Tom.

And not in vague impressions. No, vividly. As if she was him.

She knew how to craft a curse that would make a man forget his name.

She remembered the precise moment he discovered the Chamber of Secrets.

She could taste the magic in the word Horcrux, and she knew exactly how it felt to split a soul.

But she was not Tom Riddle. Not Voldemort.

She was Nagini.

And that terrified her more than anything else.

Because the line between remembering and being blurred more each day.

She tried to cast a spell once. Just once.

"Lumos."

Nothing.

She tried again.

Still nothing.

She threw the wand — taken from a dead witch after consuming her — across the clearing.

She was a carrier. A shadow. A vessel of his knowledge — but not his power.

She shifted into snake form and curled in rage.

She would not remain weak.

She would not remain.

She would become.

And in that moment, something ancient inside her stirred.

Not a voice. Not a command.

But a desire.

To finish what he started.

To rebuild.

And to consume.

....

....

Nagini crouched in the hollow of a half-fallen tree, her hands clutched around her knees. Wind hissed through the woods. The air stank of dead roots and something coppery. She didn’t feel cold, or warm. She didn’t feel.

Because there was nothing.

No call. No pull. No psychic tether winding through her spine. The link that had once bound her to him — to her master — was gone. She had searched.

And found nothing.

Voldemort — Tom — was gone.

And she was still here.

Still something.

Screaming, she clawed her face. The human side bled. The snake side peeled. She didn’t know where the line ended. Flesh and fang blended. Her tongue flickered between split lips. It tasted like ash.

How was she here, and he was not?

Her mind convulsed. Memories — too many, too loud — fought for air.

Flickers. Images. Glimpses.

The diary. The ring. The cup. The locket. The diadem.

A pattern. A shape.

A set.

Why do I remember these?

She stumbled to her feet, hands trembling. Her reflection stared at her from a pool of black water. The surface rippled — one eye was gold, the other pitch void. Her lips moved without her meaning to.

"They must be gathered."

Why?

Because there was a reason. She didn’t know what. Only that her bones ached with the need to complete something.

What?

The set. The collection. The pieces.

They weren’t just objects. They were her. They were him.

Were they him?

Was she him?

The thought twisted in her skull. 

She had to finish it. What? The circle. No—set. It wasn’t clear. But the ache in her bones screamed the number seven.

She remembered placing the diadem. Yes. In Hogwarts. In the Room of Requirement. She remembered pacing along the seventh-floor corridor, muttering under breath. She? Or he?

She remembered her hands. Pale. Long-fingered. Not hers. But hers. The memory was solid. The skin was not.

She remembered laughter. Cold, triumphant.

Had she done that?

Had he?

Were they the same?

She gripped her head. It felt like it would split. Her fingers clutched at her scalp. Her tongue — hers? — flickered.

The Diadem. It came first. It was in Hogwarts.

She remembered that clearly. The only memory that pulsed with truth. It had a purpose there. A function. Unlike her. Useless, wandering, unraveling.

She couldn’t retrieve it. Not without raising alarm. Not without tipping the balance. It was working on its own. She knew that.

So she turned to the next.

The cup.

A vault. Layers of enchantment. Blood magic. Goblin locks. Impossible to breach. Unless...

Unless she could find Bellatrix. But Bellatrix was… where was she? Locked away in Azkaban? What even was an azkaban? Wizarding prison. Memories flooded through her, fetching her answers to questions she didn’t know. Bellatrix. Rodolphus. Rabastan. Neither would cooperate. Nor would the goblins. 

And Nagini had no magic. She would die before even reaching Azkaban.

She hissed. 

Next.

The locket.

Her head tilted.

It pulled at her, faintly. But then — she recoiled.

Too much magic. Too many barriers. Not made for snakes. Not for half-corpses. Not even for memory-thieves. The wards would detect her. Shred her. She remembered the cave — vaguely — from two lives ago. Even Voldemort had to use tricks and protections to enter. She had no such tricks.

So.

That left the ring. The ring... something inside her recoiled. A stone, maybe. Or something older. It didn’t like her.

Her gaze lifted.

She remembered a shack.

Rotted timbers. Old blood. A family name carved into doorposts. The name Gaunt.

Yes. That’s where the ring was.

That’s where he had bled.

She smiled — or bared her teeth. Hard to say. Her lips had forgotten the shape of kindness.

The ring was raw. Ancient. Tied to something older than even her master’s schemes. Family magic. Bones in the soil.

She could go there.

She would.

Because the ring still pulsed. It was alive. Waiting. And maybe, just maybe — if she fed it enough — it would become him.

If she couldn’t find Voldemort, she would grow him.

Flesh by flesh.

Soul by soul.

She would bring him back.

Or become him.

She stood in the clearing, bare feet pressing into soft earth. Rain began to fall, soft at first, then harder. Her skin did not flinch. Water ran down her neck, washing through the patches of scale that riddled her arms.

She turned toward the east.

Toward Britain.

Toward the shack in Little Hangleton.

She shifted.

The bones cracked. Limbs shortened. Skin split. Her body lengthened, narrowed — coils unfurling like rope.

Her tongue flickered.

It smelled of grave-dirt and destiny.

Nagini slithered forward, through the mud, through the dark.

—

Far away, in a castle made of stone and secrets, a diadem burned brighter.

Inside a certain basin, bubbles erupted from the potion, a glittering locket fallen at the base.

In a sealed vault, a cold cup stirred.

And in the woods, a girl with a cracked mind crawled toward something older than evil.

Something broken.

Something that wanted to be whole.

....

....

It was more difficult than she had anticipated.

She could not Apparate. Could not fly. Could not speak the words that broke space and rewrote distance. But she could move.

She could slither.

She could ride.

It began with a fisherman off the coast of Denmark. A man forgotten by time, with skin like old bark and eyes bleached by years of salt. His boat was a derelict trawler barely held together by rust and rope. He fished alone, slept alone, drank alone. A perfect vessel.

Nagini watched him from the tidepools, her body sleek and powerful, a perfect blend of serpent and woman. No longer rotting, no longer stitched together with desperation and decay. Now she was whole again. Her eyes gleamed gold in the moonlight. Her scales shimmered like obsidian. Her human form, when it manifested, held the unblemished beauty she once possessed in her twenties—only colder, sharper. Her presence no longer repelled; it enthralled and unsettled in equal measure.

She waited.

The man lit a cigarette with shaking hands. Muttered to ghosts. Played an old tape of crackling jazz. He spoke Danish with a rasp that sounded like stone scraped against bone.

Nagini waited.

On the second night, she boarded the trawler. Slithered through bilge and rope. Nestled herself in the deepest part of the hold beneath a tarp that smelled of old salt and diesel. She did not sleep. Instead, she extended herself—not her body, not even her soul—but a thread of something deeper. A whisper of essence. A hook.

The man twitched in his sleep. He dreamed of serpents and black water. Of whispering women with eyes like gods.

When he woke, something inside him had shifted. His hands trembled as he reached for the compass. He frowned at the heading. Muttered again. Then, as if in trance, he adjusted the wheel.

East.

Toward the North Sea. Toward England.

Nagini, still hidden, felt the pulse of victory hum through her.

The trawler groaned through the waves. Wind and sea fought against the rust-bitten vessel, but the fisherman pressed on. He barely noticed the frost on his fingers. He barely registered the bleeding blister on his heel. His dreams were louder now—full of serpents that whispered and a name that echoed in his bones: Tom.

Nagini curled tighter beneath the tarp, her form occasionally shifting from woman to serpent and back again, and contemplated her condition.

She could not cast magic. Wands rejected her touch. Words of power vanished from her lips before they were born. But something deeper had awakened.

Her soul shimmered with power.

She could possess.

She could invade.

She could see into minds and twist them like wet rope. Not through Legilimency. Through instinct. Through presence. She was not casting spells—she was becoming them. Her will was a wave, and mortals bowed beneath it.

She had never trained in possession. Never learned it. Yet when she slipped her will into another being, it was seamless. Natural. As if she had done it many times before. As if it had always been part of her.

The fisherman was barely aware of how his thoughts shifted. How his guilt festered. How he began to see things out of the corner of his eye—shadows with serpents’ eyes. Every time he thought to turn back, a weight in his chest reminded him of something ancient and inevitable.

On the third day, he stopped praying. On the fourth, he began to carve strange symbols into the wood of the cabin. Symbols she remembered. On the fifth, they saw England.

....

....

The docks at Hull were quiet beneath a sheet of cold rain. A bitter wind scraped against steel and stone. Lamps flickered in protest. No portmasters noticed the vessel's arrival. The lone trawler groaned against its mooring like a beast that had finally died.

The fisherman sat in the captain’s chair, eyes glazed, mouth slack.

Nagini rose from the hold.

She moved with grace now. Her limbs strong. Her spine fluid. Her transformation into her human form was seamless. She wore the face she remembered from her youth—beautiful, calm, expressionless. A porcelain doll with a soul of knives.

The fisherman looked at her, and his eyes filled with tears.

"Please," he whispered.

She tilted her head, smiled faintly, and kissed his forehead.

Then snapped his neck, and drank deeply of his blood. 

A few minutes and a fisherman-snack later, Nagini stepped ashore, clothed in his coat and boots. The fabric hung loosely around her shoulders. Her hair lay flat against her scalp, dripping with rain.

Children looked away. Dogs whined. Lights above her buzzed and went out as she passed.

Nobody stopped her.

Nobody ever did.

....

....

She boarded a bus. The driver stared at her for a heartbeat too long, then waved her through. She sat at the back, her face hidden, her thoughts unfurling like tendrils into the minds around her.

The woman in the seat ahead of her remembered a miscarriage. The man beside her had killed someone once and buried the body in a field. The child across the aisle didn’t know why he was crying.

Nagini said nothing. But her power tasted everything.

Outside, England blurred by.

Each mile brought her closer.

To the ring. To the shack. To the next piece.

To what needed to be done.

And far away, buried under old wood and bloodstained dirt, something stirred.

The ring began to breathe.

....

....

The Gaunt shack stood like a forgotten curse in the woods outside Little Hangleton. It was barely more than timber and rot, half-swallowed by ivy, shivering under a crooked sky. But the magic coiled around it was ancient. Alive.

Nagini felt it the moment her bare feet touched the boundary line — like walking into teeth.

The first ward was woven into the ground itself. Not visible, not marked. It existed in memory and blood — a barrier keyed to the Gaunt lineage. Anyone outside that family would find the path turning them around, forgetting the very purpose of their visit.

Nagini hissed.

She pressed her hand to the earth and whispered in Parseltongue. Not a spell — a statement. A name.

"Marvolo."

The earth pulsed. Accepted her. Not as kin, but as heir.

The path opened.

As she approached, more protections revealed themselves — not through sight, but through the bones of the land. Voldemort had twisted the family wards, binding them with his own essence. One required an incantation in Parseltongue. Another tested blood. A third demanded memory — a scene from the past, played in the mind, verified by intent.

Spellwork was impossible. But Nagini had knowledge.

She remembered.

She remembered his hand pressing against this door.

She remembered the look in his eyes when he killed his father.

She remembered the smell of the soil when he buried the ring.

Finally, she reached the door. The last ward.

It shimmered in the air like oil over water.

A test.

Not of blood. Not of memory. But of loyalty.

It demanded an offering. Not of flesh — but of conviction.

Nagini knelt, pressed her palm against the threshold, and whispered, “I am the echo of your will. Let me in.”

The ward resisted.

Then — flickered.

Then — fell.

The door creaked open.

She entered.

The inside was dark. A damp stillness. Floorboards wept with mold. In the center, a thick iron chest, runes pulsing faintly on its lid. Dust curled in the air like old breath. Every surface was coated with time. The scent of dried blood and ancient curses lingered.

Nagini approached it slowly. Each step awakened more of Voldemort’s old defenses — a web of hexes, seeping curses, a sleep-death ward she countered by drawing the right sigil with her finger in the dust.

She touched the chest. It clicked open.

Inside, resting like a crown in a coffin, was the Ring.

The moment she looked at it, her breath caught. Not in fear.

In need.

The sensation came like a flood. A compulsion. A promise.

Put it on.

Her hand moved without thinking. Fingers trembling, she lifted the Ring. The metal was warm. Heavy. It pulsed with memory. With command. With him.

She slid it onto her finger.

And screamed.

Her entire body spasmed. Veins blackened. Her skin blistered. Gold light bled from her eyes as a force more ancient than her tore through her spine.

The Ring burned.

She tried to pull it off — but it had vanished into her hand.

And then — like paper curling in flame — she folded in on herself. Flesh twisting, limbs convulsing. Her scream became a snake’s hiss, then a howl of spirit.

In a blink, she was gone, back into spirit form. She howled in fury but it was to no avail. She had come so far. And once again, she was nothing.

The Ring clattered back into the chest.

The lid shut.

Silence returned.

Nagini was not amused.